GoKawiilMarc Brooker uses animations and real Postgres traces to show metastable failures
AWS engineer Marc Brooker describes building interactive animations to illustrate system failure modes, including a 'Stability Sim' for metastability and a demonstration of Raft losing writes when a cluster member's storage lies about fsync(). He also shares a trace from Postgres 16 running in a MicroVM showing how a load spike pushes queries off the page cache and onto disk, slowing the database even after handling 20 queries-per-second comfortably before the spike.
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These visualizations aim to counter skepticism that metastable failures are mostly theoretical, suggesting such dynamics can emerge even in mature, production-proven databases like Postgres. By grounding abstract distributed-systems concepts in concrete traces, Brooker's approach could help engineers build better intuition for diagnosing cascading failures and capacity-related slowdowns in real deployments.
- Marc Brooker builds animations to explain complex distributed systems concepts like metastability.
- A Raft cluster can lose writes if one node's storage falsely reports fsync() success.
- Real Postgres 16 traces show load spikes can push queries from page cache to disk, degrading performance.
Source: brooker.co.za — Marc Brooker, 2026-10-23
Published there as: “Animations for System Builders”
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